DVDFab team is very active during a few weeks, after a beta release of their popular DVD-to-DVD, Blu-ray-to-Blu-ray and DVD or Blu-ray to Mobile copy tools DVDFab 7, they just announced in their forum the release of DVDFab passkey beta, available for download.

What is DVDFab Passkey ? consider it as a driver to decrypt on the fly the encrypted disc, indeed the originals DVD and Blu-ray discs are protected and can’t be read without an extra tool or a genuine video player.

Use a rip tool, which will only decrypt and save the file to your local hard drive, but it takes a lot of space, and you will have to read again the information a second time to make a conversion. Exemple : DVD Decrypter

Use a “driver Style” solution, it will side by side with another software of your choice, it works in the background and just intercept the calls to the DVD or Blu-ray drive to serve the file decrypted. It is a nice solution to read directly the files with the tool of your choice. For example VLC doesn’t support decrypting, but with a driver-level tool, you can use any existing application, it can be required to bypass the area limitation. The most popular software are AnyDVD HD from Slysoft, and DVD43

Use a software already including a decrypt feature, so you don’t have to worry to launch another program, but you are binded to that software and his capability to make the decryption part correctly : Exemple DVDFab platinum

So is DVDFab passkey will take some market share in this very specialized market ? I installed it on 2 computers, and didn’t face a problem, I used it to remove the area protection for a Blu-ray ( from USA ) and so I was able to play it on a european Blu-ray PC reader

What is LOTR ? that’s the acronym for the Lord of the Rings, the famous books from J.R.R Tolkien.The trilogy of Peter Jackson is finally announced in a Blu-ray edition. Blu-ray is the new HD video format, and as any new technology the early adopters can help to make it a success or a failure. Let me expose this interesting case. We have very special conditions there, in one hand a long-time awaited movie with a huge community fans ( I m kind one of them ), and in the other hand a new market with Blu-ray Players, HD TV, 2 fans group with high expectation is a blowing recipe and headache to manage.

1 – 1st comment, the delay for the release of this trilogy has been too long, it was a quite recent movie with already a lot of post-processing done, a perfect candidate for the movie industry which could have actually helped the blu-ray players sales. That’s a first mistake but for sure, it was maybe more depending on the director than the studios themself.

2 – The work needed to produce that HD / Blu-ray edition of the Lord of the rings was probably a little bit postponed due to the HD format wars, when it was not sure to see which format between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray could be the winner ( and by the way the Peter’s Jackson King-Kong was released in HD-DVD first )

3 – Let’s go back to the event… finally the Lord of the rings Blu-ray edition is announced with a release date 6th of April 2010, and while the previous comments from users and fans were pure speculation, the things are turning bad for the studios. Lock at Amazon page

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… and see the users’ review.. 2000+ reviews, an average rating of only 1.5 / 5 , that’s lame and I remind the movie isn’t released yet. The rating and comments aren’t really about the movie ( which is excellent of course ), but about the anger of users to see a products which doesnt fit their expectation. Indeed, despite the long extended version has been releade in DVD, the Blu-ray edition is introduced only with a the original theater version. Users are loudly banning the product before it has been released. How could it affect really the sales of the product ? Are the fans will really wait, or they will buy it anyway. They will feel a lot of dissappointement and frustration but even with the theatrical version, it will ( I hope ) be a fantastic demonstration for the Blu-ray technology

4 – What will be the real sales trend of this edition ? Do you think most people will wait or not, or buy anyway a movie they probably have already in their DVD collection ? Do you think some other movies could lead such interests ? Some movies mark a milestone in the technology used and the visual effects, it was the case with the Matrix Trilogy for DVD, and it is with new Avatar from James Cameron for 3D

What is your opinion ? will you buy this version ? any other movies which lead some extra adoption of a Blu-ray player ?